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The hardest thing was to get the dashed-off feeling of one great, distracted mind in a generous hurry to commune with another; but after three hours he was pretty sure he'd nailed it.

Self-help

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

Love. Anaïs Non called anxiety ' love's greatest killer'. But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love... is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. This is not selfishness, even though people read it as such. If your leg is on fire, it is not selfish to concentrate on the pain, or the fear of the flames.

The day came. Tuesday, 17 March 1997. It looked like so many other drab Hull days. But it wasn't. Looks were deceptive. There was threat in the air. Everything - even the furniture in our student house - looked like secret weapons in an invisible war against me. Reading Dracula for my Gothic Literature module wasn't helping either. ('I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things...'

Depression is also...

Smaller than you.

Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky.

You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

Of course, it was still England. It was still Yorkshire. Light was severely rationed. But this was as good as it got on our budget, or just above our budget, and it was certainly better than the student flat with its burgundy carpets and its brown kitchen. Turquoise sofa beat turquoise cold.

Clouds with silver linings are still clouds. But it is quite therapeutic to know that pleasure doesn’t just help compensate for pain, it can actually grow out of it.

I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, ... wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.

She filled in the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself.

If, as Schopenhauer said, ‘we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people,’ then love — at its best — is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

What had Andrea gained in that time, since the night before her nineteenth birthday? A continued sense of financial insecurity? An inadequate, alcohol-impaired sex life?

Minds move. Personalities shift. To quote myself, from The Humans: ‘Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.’

Brains don’t explode. Life isn’t a David Cronenberg movie.
But maybe I could fall the same distance again. Maybe the fall that happened in Ibiza had only landed me halfway. Maybe the actual Underworld was much further down in the basement and I was heading there, and I’d end up like a shell-shocked soldier from a poem, dribbling and howling and lost, unable even to kill myself.

Shops, by the way, were the places I would panic in most, with or without Andrea. Shops caused me intense anxiety. I was never really sure what it was.
Was it the lighting?
Was it the geometric layout of the aisles?
Was it the CCTV cameras?
Was it that the point of brads was to scream for attention, and when you were deeply in tune with your surroundings maybe those screams got to you? A kind of death by Unilever.

The longer that time went on, and I was still a) alive and b) not mistaking anyone for a hat, the more I felt like there was a chance I could get through this. But it didn’t always work like that. I stacked the days up like Jenga blocks, imagining I was making progress, and then —crash— along would come a five-hour panic attack or a day of total apocalyptic darkness, and those Jenga days would topple back down again.

A brain is not a toaster. It is complex. It may only weigh a little over a kilo, but it is a kilo that contains a whole lifetime of memories.

It is worryingly magical, in that it does so much with us still not understanding how or why. It is — like all else — made out of atoms which themselves came into being in stars millions of years ago. Yet more is known about those faraway stars than the processes of our brain.

Everyone you have ever met will be dead this time next century.

Yep. Everyone you know is just a collection of slowly deteriorating cells.

A human body is bigger than it looks. Advances in science and technology have shown that, really, a physical body is a universe in itself. Each of us is made up of roughly a hundred trillion cells. In each of those cells is roughly that same umber again of atoms. That is a lot of separate components. Our brains alone have a hundred billion brain cells, give or take a few billion.

But anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication still fill me with fear. It doesn't help that the names - Fluoxetine, Vlenfaxine, Propanolol, Zopiclone - sound like sci-fi villains.

In his imperfection resided the key to his perfection, in his lack of wholeness the secret of his holiness. He was a soul of thresholds, and like all souls of thresholds, had something eerie about him. He was both a man and yet so holy you could not possibly regard him as one. He was a holy man and yet so crippled you could not possibly disregard how mortal he was.

Auntie Banu opened a drawer, pulled out a huge, shiny knife, grabbed an onion lying on the counter, and cut it in half. She then cupped one half of the onion and pushed it toward Auntie Zeliha's nose.

"What are you doing?" Auntie Zeliha jumped in her chair.

"I am helping you to cry, my dear. [...] As much of a free spirit as you might be, even you need to shed a tear or two in the house of the dead."

To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in the hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour.

It is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and a
daylight. It is the only time in which it is still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build them anew.

Though. looks were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moles night in the desert.

We all as one, turned to Maude in anticipation of her reaction; had I known at the time who Joan Crawford was, I would have said that she was giving us her very best Joan Crawford, an expression that mixed contempt and vulnerability as she took a long drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke from her lips so steadily that it created a miasma behind which her true feelings could hide.

But for all we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, ad this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably towards isolation and disaster.

It hadn't seemed strange at the time, but the more I overthought it, the less sure I felt.

"You don't want to know?"
"I desperately want to know," I said. "But I will just privately obsess over it, like a normal person."